Can Life Be a Technology?

In 2009 the Initiative for Science, Society and Policy coined the phrase ‘living technology’ [1] to draw attention to a group of emerging technologies that are useful because they share some of the fundamental properties of living systems. The technologies fell short of being fully ‘alive’ yet they possessed at least some unique characteristics that are usually associated with ‘life’: Self-assembly, self-organization, metabolism, growth and division, purposeful action, adaptive complexity, evolution, and intelligence. Examples of this new field of technology include synthetic biology, attempts to make living systems from scratch in the laboratory [2], ICT systems exhibiting collective and swarm intelligence and robot companions.

‘Living technology’ may be an oxymoron, yet despite its innate contradictions, it does not propose an empirical measurement of the ‘aliveness’ or ‘usefulness’ of the systems it represents. Rather the term implies a fundamental change in the way we engage with our world. Indeed, the idea of living technology embodies a complex, non-mechanical approach to the process of problem-solving, which frames the expectations of its performance.

The technological concerns of living technology are allied with Martin Heidegger’s ecological view of technology. Heidegger regarded our relationship with nature through technological revelations as being more significant than any utilitarian function. He proposed that modern technology turns nature, and ultimately humans, into a standing reserve of resources [3]. Living technology shares this ecological concern and suggests a more environmentally compatible kind of technology, which is more complex, interconnected and responsive than the machine-based devices that have characterized the 20th century.

Since ‘livingness’ embodies a unique set of properties that machines do not possess, such as robustness, flexibility, the capacity to deal with the unexpected and the ability to surprise, then living technology operates in fundamentally different ways than machines, particularly in the way that they are controlled and interacted with. Living technologies evade dualistic modes of operation (such as on/off switches) and hierarchical notions of organization, such as the pods described in David Cronenberg’s 1999 film ExistenZ, which depicts humans reacting and interacting with an organic, living videogame. Indeed, when it comes to living technology, it may not even be possible to see the control point, let alone figure out how to turn it off, shut it down or even remove it – so the expectations and engagements with them change. Additionally, the inherent complexity of these technologies affects more than just their organizational aspects, but their embodiment too.

In the science fiction story “The Universe of Things,” Gwyneth Jones (2010) [4] describes an encounter between a human being and an alien whose superior technologies are intrinsically alive:

“They had tools that crept, slithered, flew, but they had made these things… They built things with bacteria… Bacteria which were themselves traceable to the aliens’ own intestinal flora, infecting everything.”

In contemporary Western culture we are accustomed to being trapped in a world of dead, or merely passive, matter, which is constrained through the machine metaphor to serve our own purposes. Living technology empowers to engage with the inherent energies in the non-human world as ‘actants’ [5], which have their own powers, therefore enabling us to allyourselves with them [6]. Jane Bennett calls this property of the non-human world ‘vital materialism’, which isthe recognition that “vitality is shared by all things,” and not limited to ourselves alone [7]. Through vital materialism, we learn how to accommodate their nature and their needs, as well as our own. In other words, we discover how to exist harmoniously within an ecology of relationships, rather than thinking solely in mechanical terms.

However, living technology is not independent of human existence. It is not alive, and actually depends on interactions with humans for its context, functioning and survival. More life-like technologies increase our responsibility towards our planetary resources, and are a necessary step in our engagement with a more ecological way of revealing and creating influence in the world. The politics, ethics and implications of living technology are still emerging and are a recurrent theme for the discoveries of next nature.